Terminology

This topic defines some terms frequently referenced in Telerik Data Access documentation. Links are provided to relevant topics where additional information is available.

Term	Definition
Association	The definition of a relationship between persistent classes. For more information, see Mapping Associations.
Conceptual Model	An abstract specification for the persistent classes, the complex types, and the associations in the domain of an application using Telerik Data Access.
Concurrency	A process that allows multiple users to access and change shared data at the same time. By default, Telerik Data Access implements an optimistic concurrency model. Read more
Model	A set of concepts that describe the structure of the data, as persistent classes and relationships, regardless of its stored form. For more information, see Code Only Scenario.
Eager Loading	The process of loading a specific set of related objects along with the objects that were explicitly requested in the query.
Lazy Loading	When objects are returned by a query, related objects are not loaded at the same time. By default, they are loaded until explicitly requested using a navigation property.
Foreign Key Association	An association between persistent classes that is managed through foreign key properties. For more information, see Mapping Associations.
Primary Key	The attribute of a persistent class that specifies which property or set of properties is used to identify unique instances of the type.
LINQ to OpenAccessContext	A query syntax that defines a set of query operators that allow traversal, filter, and projection operations to be expressed in a direct, declarative way in C# and VB.NET. Read more
Mapping	A specification of the correspondences between items in a conceptual model and items in a storage model.
Multiplicity	The number of entities that can exist on each side of a relationship, as defined by an association. Also known as cardinality.
Navigation Property	A property of a persistent class that represents a relationship to another persistent class, as defined by an association. Navigation properties are used to return related objects as a collection or a reference, depending on the multiplicity at the other end of the association (e.g. product.Category and category.Products).
Persistent Class, Entity	The entity is the fundamental building block for describing the structure of data within the model. Entities are constructed from properties and describe the structure of top-level concepts, such as products and orders in a business application. Simply, you can consider the model entities as regular CLR classes.
OpenAccessContext	The context is a child class of the OpenAccessContext. This class contains read-only properties that return an IQueryable of each type that you want to work with. You can use these properties to read the objects you want from the database. For more information, take a look at the Code Only Scenario article, and the CRUD Operations section.
Relationship	A logical connection between persistent classes.
Role	The name given to each End of an association to clarify the semantics of the relationship.
Scalar Property	A property of a persistent class that maps to a single field in the storage model.
Simple Type	A primitive type that is used for defining properties in the conceptual model (e.g. Int32, Boolean, Decimal).
Storage Model	Defines the underlying database components like tables, columns, foreign keys, and indexes, in the MetaDataSource class.
Telerik Data Access	A set of technologies that support development of data-oriented software applications by enabling developers to work with conceptual models that are mapped to logical schemes in data sources.